The place had everything. An indoor swimming pool. A gym for his training. Six bedrooms, four bathrooms, a kitchen you could play a game of cricket in and a lounge as big as a barn. It wasn’t exactly homely, but Shauna was made up with it and had been eating into the money again as she furnished the place as grandly as she liked. Christ, she liked the high life, his wife. Before long they had interior designers poncing around the place as Shauna’s vision of how they should be living took shape. All she ever seemed to do these days was thumb through copies of Homes & Gardens, exclaiming over sofas and footstools and all that shit, then poring over swatches of fabric and carpets.

Oh, and when their anniversary rolled round, Shauna made a huge fuss about it. He wished she wouldn’t. For him, truthfully? It was just another year gone, with the wrong woman beside him.

Money was no object now; the sky was the limit. Since the big payout for solving Dave’s problem, he hadn’t done any more work of that sort. He didn’t want to. Shauna had got a blond mink coat out of it and strutted around the bedroom wearing that and nothing else, a big grin on her face. But Josh felt sick to see it – luxury, bought with dirty money. He’d disposed of the sawn-off out in the Solent, tossing it into the waves from a mate’s fishing boat, but he’d kept the other yogger, the Magnum, taped it ready-loaded to the inside of the wardrobe in their bedroom, for security. For himself, he’d rather fight an army hand-to-hand than fire a gun at them, but he had Shauna and the baby to think of.

Not yogger, he mentally corrected himself. Gun.

Shauna would rip him an extra arsehole if she heard him calling the gun that. But he missed the old language. Missed the old ways. And he knew that he’d trade all this grandeur, in the blink of an eye, for that brand-new van he’d bought for him and Claire to live in. He’d happily exchange all the posh dinner parties with their stuck-up neighbours for a single evening by the camp fire, cooking game caught fresh that day over an open flame while one of the old timers played a tune on the mouth organ.

Ah, shit. What was the use of even thinking about it?

Linus Pole’s boys had solved the drugs issue in Dave Houghton’s club and things were returning to normal there. As for Josh, he kept fighting, people coming at him with challenges at Linus’s fairground, big bets being laid, and so he was quids in. He never lost. It didn’t even enter his head that he ever would.

55

55